Hi, [Jens, sorry for the re-send - trying to convince gmail to send plain text.]
Just ran into a submodules usability situation at $dayjob that might be worth looking at. An internal maintainer was going to pull changes in from a project team into our repository which is arranged into submodules for various components. The maintainer decided that the best thing for him would be to create a new working area to do the merging so he re-cloned the super project (with default settings of git 1.7.9.5). What he then forgot to do is "git submodule update --init" but because the empty submodules were real directories he was able to continue with what he thought was the right procedure of "cd submodule && git pull project/submodule.git". He did notice the no changes in common message and a whole bunch of unexpected modifications at which point he grabbed me so no harm done. This did get me thinking. Why does an uninitialized submodule need to have an empty directory? If it didn't the maintainer in question probably would have realized that he needed to run "git submodule update --init" when his "cd submodule" command failed. I'm guessing there is a good reason for the empty directory - perhaps so that git can notice the fact that it exists in the worktree but is out of date? If it does need to have some presence in the worktree why not as a file? That way the cd command would still fail (albeit with a different error) providing the necessary indication to the user. The submodule update --init could then change from file -> dir when it actually gets populated. Thanks for reading, Chris -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
